Bummer Obseshes

Obseshes aren’t always the happier, excitinger, positive-bright-sided things of life, you guys. Obseshes are also the bleakest, most-worst preoccupations, which are just as likely to dominate a subconscious/conscious/conscience as whatever it is you’re bopping around to and loving (which for me, right now, is basically everything on television?). Here are this week’s Bummer Obseshes, forthwith.

KIM KARDASHIAN NEGS

Listen, girl is pregnant and wearing all manner of ridiculous Lanvin and Givenchy and real, real tight leathers (say it like “leatha,” like Liam Lynch) and real, real short skirts and is getting shit on from like several different directions and several different shit sources for defying the sociocultural laws of pregnancy and wearing the clothes she likes (haha: I mean, “what Kanye likes, probably”). Myyyyyy question/response to this crucial trash-tabloid ish is (here, picture me in a powder-blue power suit, and pointing): Have you not seen her current and explosive T&A? Girl has literally become the comic-book superhero version of herself, and it is so, so right. She is just showing off! It’s fine! She is within her rights to be walking around going “DEEZ TITS!” all day if she wants! Just calm down and have a glass of milk. What is Kim Kardashian-the-symbol’s purpose in this world but to make normies uncomfortable with their feelings about women without couture bodies? With big, expressive families and huge spider eyelashes? Riiiight? Except right now she’s doing exactly the same thing by pregnant-dressing in a way that seems to be just what she wants and who she is but makes everyone else grossed out, which is the saaaame thing she did when she was scream-crying about her Bentley or getting waxed or cellulite-treated on her E! show. Like, fucking relax.

COACHELLA

I quite liked what Our Lady of Naked Thighs (Lena Dunham of course, of course) had to say about Coachella somewhere in my social networks (OK it turns out it was Twitter), that for her it evokes the double trouble of “Live music events where I don't know the words, rainboots when it's dry out!” I don’t care about that first thing but SUPER WORD to the second thing. Did you guys grow up somewhere snowy? I did. Do you know what it’s like to be sent to school on a nice enough day where the weather might, at any moment, turn cataclysmic (which could happen any day at all during September, October, November, March, April, and May in my hometown, which is the broken buckle of what is called “the snowbelt” in Canada) wearing a full snowsuit? Them shits include snowpants, which are actually “snow overalls” (SNOWVERALLS? YES YES YES) that clip at the shoulder, so entering and exiting the outdoors is not just about pulling some downy pants over your corduroys, but climbing into a pink Hazmat experience to walk from the portable to the school building to pee or have a sip of fountain water or do art class or whatever. Actually it’s possible that this was only required for recess and home-time and my self-diagnosed/not-real complex post-traumatic stress-disorder is reconfiguring this memory, but, the thing of putting weather-clothing on in anticipation of actual weather is the sickest, filthiest feeling. It’s not just that it’s too hot: it’s that the slick protective pre-Goretex of a snow-pant or the dry, thick rubber of a rain boot without attendant weather feels like swimming in chalk, or, just a repeal of what we know about “touch” and “texture.” I feel you, Lena Dunham.

#TBT

Look, nobody wants to see your baby pictures. We’re pretty much done with #FF and getting closer to being done with hashtags generally so can #TBT vanish into that same boringed-out internet-ether? (Caveat: whoever has a crush on you actually does want to see your baby pictures, so maybe just text them instead. It’s nicer that way. Do a little message too, something cute.)

GIRL GANG FASHION CUES

Spring Breakers and Bling Ring are two of the three indicators (What will be the third! There has to be a third! This is a rule of journalism, that three makes a trend, but unless we just count “Rihanna” generally it’s just two for now) of a new girl-movement, away from the now-over-established dreamy-gauzy-roadtrippy-hazy way of aestheticizing and editorializing girl culture. This is good with me: I’m a sucker for sweetness, for Prada-style minty, lemony, Mini-Egg-y palettes, for laying in grass on a blanket, for letting go of life-defining negativities and doing the way, way harder work of trying to be happy, in swaths instead of just short moments of relief. More than any other the way it communicates gentle hope and an elevation of what is “nice” and maybe cartoonishly feminine, and is comforting and viable to me and everyone else who has been shedding layers of black-denim angst for literally 20 years and has found themselves in a maybe-final emotional place that resembles the kind of pillow that maybe a baby chick or a bunny hangs out on somewhere in the backyard of a really peaceful and style-bloggable farmhouse and is cool with that.

OK so that’s probs boring and I’m sorry but what I mean to say is that while I am super-duper psyched to see Sofia Coppola’s Bling Ring (Sofia is Our Lady of Dreamy Gauzy, don’t forget) I am also liiiiiike what are the aesthetic consequences going to be? This summer is already set for Floridian streetwear/Spring Breakers knock-offs (fine with me) but will that neon-niche become a cultivated teenage dirtbag aesthetic that moves back into mainstream culture while studded high-heels are still on clearance, thereby confusing two separate though related ideas of “bad girl”? Will Bling Ring end up just looking like The Hills (I mean, it is a period piece, in a way), or will it carry the thread of rebellious sartorials into another horrible era of pre-torn jeans? I just don’t feel like we can move so quickly from the pixie-dust mood that has been foregrounded for the last while directly to a hardcore teen-girl-gang mood. It’s dangerous for the fashion/etc. continuum to not just let itsleep for more than a season. (Does Avril’s new single have anything to do with this? Shit.)